


you're half the world away

by hoehotdameron



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Poe Dameron centred, Poe is poly/pan and a transboy ya'll can fight me on this, bare with me, but for now is angst, first chapter is set up sorry, this is my first Star Wars fic, will eventually be fluffy fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-18 04:19:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7299325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoehotdameron/pseuds/hoehotdameron
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can’t escape this, and neither could Finn. Finn; the one man on that ship who was brave and bold enough to help him. The one man who’d reached out in the darkness and pulled him toward a ship. The man he’d just slammed into the surface of Jakku straight outta the skies, and killed. He can remember Finn’s eyes; dark and caring and shining like the stars. He can remember them even now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're half the world away

It’s hot, and it’s dry, the sand spreading like seas out to the horizon in every direction, but Poe Dameron feels like he’s drowning. He can’t breathe, he can’t feel his face anymore because he’s running on empty, beaten and bloody and water--- _please, water, anybody, I’m going to die here._

Water isn’t a luxury his body can afford anymore. He’s sweating out every drop of it he can find, pulling it from the fibres of his muscles and the slight soft pudge of his stomach, and even that’s disappearing. Poe can’t remember the taste of food, nor the texture. If he thinks hard enough, he can remember the way the serving girl on base would wink at him each time he brought a meal. But even her eyes are fading away into the same dull sand colour, beige and brown as far as he can see. Breathing hurts, his shattered ribs aching constantly as he walks, and each time he spits he can taste blood. It's not the worst that the First Order have done to him, but it hurts, and it makes none of this any easier. If something wanted to chase him, he'd have no chance of evading it.

He can’t escape this, and neither could Finn. Finn; the one man on that ship who was brave and bold enough to help him. The one man who’d reached out in the darkness and pulled him toward a ship. The man he’d just slammed into the surface of Jakku straight outta the skies, and killed. He can remember Finn’s eyes; dark and caring and shining like the stars. He can remember them even now, with the black spots dancing about in his peripherals. He can remember the grip of his hand against his arm when he asked him to help him, firm but gentle; like Poe had been the first person he'd ever touched, like Finn saw him as fragile. He can remember the way his smile lit up like the moon of the Yavin night sky, bright and wide in all that darkness, and he can remember the curve of his nose, rounded and different, different to anything he'd ever seen before. 

He takes another step and his boot sinks down, grit scraping against the leather and dragging him in deeper. Poe swears, the empty word floating out across the desolate landscape, before yanking his foot out again. Sinking fields to the north of the village. He must be north of Tuanal, north of the massacred villagers. Had anyone found them yet? It had been days, weeks….they must have had trading links, or families coming through. Someone must have found them. He’d been too weak to save them, trapped in the grip of Kylo Ren as he’d had his mind taken apart, memory by memory. He couldn’t have done anything….or could he? Poe swears he can hear laughter echoing in the back of his mind as reluctantly, painfully, he starts heading due South, back in the direction he’d come from. 

The black spots get worse with each passing step, each sand dune he climbs struggling with hands and feet making his body ache and quiver and he's losing control of his muscles as he resorts to sliding down the other side of the massive dune on his backside. Sand gets everywhere, coarse and dry and irritating and he can feel it chafing between his thighs, the skin red-raw-angry. It's bad enough he's without his supplements for this long: his body's starting to fight against him and the discomfort between his thighs now will only get worse if he starts bleeding again. Poe stops halfway down the mountain, watches the valley below for a while. BB-8's out there too, rolling away from where they'd been the night of the massacre and _kriff_ does Poe miss that droid like hell. What he'd give to see that ball roll across the landscape now wasn't even fathomable. 

 

But he can see nothing but sand, the odd wreckage of a TIE fighter or the older A-Wings of the Rebel Alliance, and more sand. If any of them hadn't been scavenged to death, he'd consider flying off planet, but that was unlikely. He'd stopped at a hundred ships on the way up here, each one of them either ripped beyond flight condition or being picked apart by the people of this desert, their compressors and engines stripped out, the guts of these ships laid bare on the desolate floor. None of the scavengers had offered any help to him either, and he'd had to fight a few away. But now, it seems, there is nobody. Nobody in the entire valley below him, nobody coming from out of the blue to save him again. Finn is gone, BB-8 is gone, and the Resistance, he assumes, had assumed him dead. 

The star Jakku orbits is getting low in the sky, but the heat doesn't seem to go as he slides further down. It sticks against his body, his shirt clinging against the ridged scars of his chest with an almost fluid nature to it and trapping sand against his skin, chafing and biting like the insects back home on Yavin IV. If he lay back, just let the sand consume him, Poe doubted anyone would have ever known he was there. He'd be immortalised by the Resistance as another fallen fighter, a man who died collecting intel; and that wasn't how he'd want to be known. A blaze of fire, destroying a First Order ship single handedly, in the sky, amongst the stars. That was how he wanted to go. Not down here, not in the sand having....having failed. Because ultimately he had. He'd not returned the map, BB-8 has that, wherever they are....and it was a matter of time before the Order got it. He'd failed.

 

Hitting the bottom of the slope, Poe naturally drifts to a stop. But he doesn't stand; he'd failed. He'd failed his mission, failed what General Organa had charged him with. The black spots were getting worse, his head spinning as panic over-rode him, and he cradles his head in his hands, fingers clawing at his scalp as he struggles to breath in the dusty, heavy air. The sands spread out to the horizon in every direction still, a mountain of beige blocking out the view behind him bar the pathway he'd made with his ass as he slid down the slope, and Poe Dameron feels like he's drowning. His hands are too claustrophobic, and he pulls them away from his face with a gasp. He'd failed, he'd failed as he lay back in the sand, letting himself start to sink into it as his breathing gets harder, chest tightening along the band of his scarline. One of the black spots solidifies in his vision before he closes his eyes. 

He can feel the bark of the tree in their garden under his fingertips, hear the rustle of leaves overhead, and Finn's there, in clothes from a planet he can't quite place before the tap of a staff comes against his injured ribs, and Poe Dameron yelps back to consciousness in the sand, spluttering as he does so.


End file.
